DICTIONARY ONE.COM • More 'Tree of knowledge' Quotes from Famous Books

... have handed down upon theological points of far more importance, or the equally absurd and monstrous notions which the modern history of sectarianism furnishes. From what has been said, however, it appears very clear, that Satan has had too much to do with tobacco. If it be verily the tree of knowledge, it must be admitted that he has preserved it with infinite care, as if grateful for the mighty mischief which was wrought in Eden, and as a fit instrument for those injuries in future to the human family, which so many authors ...

— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various

... negations of God always involve necessity or truth; so that, for example, if God said to Adam that He did not wish him to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, it would have involved a contradiction that Adam should have been able to eat of it, and would therefore have been impossible that he should have so eaten, for the Divine command would ...

— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza

... wrong with the boy except his ineradicable temptation to impart to you his gratuitous tidbits of information. I can't object, of course, to Gershom having a college education: what I object to is his trying to give me one. I don't mind his wisdom, but I do hate to see him tear the whole tree of knowledge up by the roots and floor one with it. He has just informed me that there are estimated to be 30,000,000,000,000 red blood corpuscles in this body of mine, and I made him blink by solemnly challenging him to prove it. ...

— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer

... knowledge: they who know the most Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth, The tree of knowledge is not that of life. Philosophy and science and the springs Of wonder, and the wisdom of the world I have essayed, and in my mind there is, A power to make ...

— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... science. The first chapters of Genesis and the entire Word are written in strict accordance with this science. The first chapters of Genesis, like the Parables of our Lord, were not intended to be understood literally; the very names therein show this clearly. A tree of life, a tree of knowledge of good and evil, a talking serpent, how can any man for a moment suppose these to be natural trees and a natural snake? Do serpents ever talk? the garden eastward in Eden, and an Ark which would not hold the hides and teeth of all the animals ...

— Personal Experience of a Physician • John Ellis

... ability thoroughly mastered would have been a far greater source of delight to her husband, and of satisfaction to herself, than the mere handful of unripe fruit which she had gathered from a dozen different branches of the tree of knowledge, and in the collecting of which she had, in a measure, impaired the elasticity of her mind and her bodily strength, and found no time for making herself mistress of a thousand little undemonstrative acquirements which tend to keep a steady ...

— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson

... consciousness that we are invited guests to a great feast of learning. Let us strive in every way to make study thoroughly enjoyable. Let us make it one long holiday in honor of the Goddess of Wisdom! One grand harvest-home of our gathering of the golden fruit from the tree of knowledge. Let us be as earnest as we are enthusiastic—let us be thorough, and withal ...

— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson

... see already the dawn of approaching manhood. The substance, the stuff, is philosophy; the form only is poetry. The Prometheus is a philosophema [Greek (transliterated): tautaegorikon], —the tree of knowledge of good and evil,—an allegory, a [Greek (transliterated): propaideuma], though the noblest and the most pregnant of ...

— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... the savage children are occupied with the trifles of lust, covetousness, and deceit. They are no worse than the sons of Penn, who became apostates to his charity and religion before the breath had left his body. So goes the human race, whether around the Tree of Knowledge or Kensington's ...

— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend

... the vast undulations of the wave-like Apennines: fertility reposes in their many folds, and woods crown the summits. The free and happy peasant, unshackled by the Austrian, bears the double harvest to the garner; and the refined citizens rear without dread the long blighted tree of knowledge in this garden of the world. We were lifted above the Alpine peaks, and from their deep and brawling ravines entered the plain of fair France, and after an airy journey of six days, we landed at Dieppe, ...

— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... Woman was the second mistake of God.—"Woman, at bottom, is a serpent, Heva"—every priest knows that; "from woman comes every evil in the world"—every priest knows that, too. Ergo, she is also to blame for science.... It was through woman that man learned to taste of the tree of knowledge.—What happened? The old God was seized by mortal terror. Man himself had been his greatest blunder; he had created a rival to himself; science makes men godlike—it is all up with priests and gods when man becomes scientific!—Moral: science is the forbidden ...

— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche

... all in reality the offspring of the first creation recounted in Genesis, in which man is not named but is simply said to be in the image of God; but we think we are the children of the creation described in the second chapter; of the race that imagined sickness, sin, and death for itself. The tree of knowledge which caused Adam's fall, Mrs. Eddy says, was the belief of life in matter, and she suggests that the forbidden fruit which Eve gave to Adam may have ...

— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various

... actors, go on repeating or feigning the same emotion. It must leave for the moment as apparently completed one branch of knowledge to which it may return again after developing some less mature branch on which the attention of the most learned investigators is for a time wholly concentrated. The tree of knowledge is an evergreen, and in science, no more than in arts, is there any decay. When Darwin published his great Origin of Species which was hailed as a revelation, not only by scientific men, but by intelligent laymen, religious people became ...

— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross

... tell Adam why and how this world was made (bk. vii.); and Adam tells Raphael his own experience (bk. viii.) After the departure of Raphael, Satan enters into a serpent, and, seeing Eve alone, speaks to her. Eve is astonished to hear the serpent talk, but is informed that it had tasted of "the tree of knowledge," and had become instantly endowed with both speech and wisdom. Curiosity induces Eve to taste the same fruit, and she persuades Adam to taste it also (bk. ix.). Satan now returns to hell, to tell of his success (bk. x.). Michael is sent to ...

— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer

... already tasted of the tree of knowledge, and the world outside beckoned to her with as fascinating a face as it ever presented to any human creature. It was during one of these returning visits to the Shoals that much of the delightful book from which I have quoted was written; a period when ...

— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields

... image of the Scriptures suddenly came back to my mind. It seemed to me that I had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge, that all the mysteries were unveiled, so much did I find myself under the sway of a new, strange and irrefutable logic. And arguments, reasonings, proofs rose up in a heap before my brain only to be immediately ...

— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... speaks in proof tones to the imagination alone and to the unaided reason bears no weight—occasionally did this poetic intellect proceed a step farther in the evolving of the vague idea of the philosophic, and find in the mystic parable that tells of the tree of knowledge, and of its forbidden fruit, death-producing, a distinct intimation that knowledge was not meet for man in the infant condition of his soul. And these men—the poets—living and perishing amid the scorn of the "utilitarians"—of rough pedants, who arrogated to themselves a title ...

— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe